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Savio was born in New York City to a Sicily-born Italian American restaurant equipment designer and manufacturer father and a US-born Italian American retail salesperson mother. Both his parents were devout Catholics and, as an altar boy, Savio was planning to become a priest.[2]

His parents had moved to Los Angeles and that autumn he enrolled at University of California, Berkeley.[3] In March the following year he was arrested while demonstrating against the San Francisco Hotel Association for excluding blacks from non-menial jobs. He was charged with trespassing, along with 167 other protesters. While in jail, a cellmate asked if he was heading for Mississippi that summer to help with the Civil Rights project.[2]

During the summer of 1964, he joined the Freedom Summer projects in Mississippi and was involved in helping African Americans register to vote.[4] He also taught at a freedom school for black children in McComb, Mississippi.[3] In July, Savio, another white civil-rights activist and a black acquaintance were walking down a road in Jackson and were attacked by two men. They filed a police report where the FBI became involved, however, the case stalled until President Lyndon Johnson, who had recently passed the Civil Rights Act, allowed the FBI to look into it as a civil-rights violation.[5] Eventually one of the attackers was found, fined $50 and charged with misdemeanor assault.[2]

When Savio returned to Berkeley after his time in Mississippi, he intended to raise money for SNCC, but found that the University had banned all political activity and all fundraising.[4] He told Karlyn Barker in 1964 that it was a question as to whose side one was on. "Are we on the side of the civil rights movement? Or have we gotten back to the comfort and security of Berkeley, California, and can we forget the sharecroppers whom we worked with just a few weeks back? Well we couldn’t forget."[6]

Savio's part in the protest on the Berkeley campus started on October 1, 1964, when former student Jack Weinberg was manning a table for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The University police had just put him into a police car when someone from the surrounding crowd yelled, "Sit down!" Savio, along with others during the 32-hour sit-in, took off his shoes and climbed on top of the car and spoke with words that roused the crowd into frenzy.[3]

The last time he climbed on the police car was to tell the crowd of a short-term understanding that had been met with UC President Clark Kerr. Savio said to the crowd, "I ask you to rise quietly and with dignity and go home",[7] and the crowd did exactly what he said. After this Savio became the prominent leader of the newly formed Free Speech Movement.[2] Negotiations failed to change the situation; therefore direct action began in Sproul Hall on December 2. There, Savio gave his most famous speech, on the "operation of the machine", in front of 4,000 people. He and 800 others were arrested that day. In 1967, he was sentenced to 120 days at Santa Rita Jail. He told reporters that "[he] would do it again".[2]

In April 1965, he quit the FSM because "he was disappointed with the growing gap between the leadership of the FSM ... and the students themselves."[8]

We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received, from a well-meaning liberal, was the following: He said, 'Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?' That's the answer!

Well, I ask you to consider: If this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors; and if President Kerr in fact is the manager; then I'll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be—have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product. Don't mean… Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Between 1965 and his death, Savio held a variety of jobs, including as a sales clerk in Berkeley and instructor at Sonoma State University.[2] In 1965, he married Suzanne Goldberg, whom he had met during the Free Speech Movement. Two months after their wedding, they moved to England because Savio had won a scholarship to the University of Oxford. While there, they had their first child, Stefan. Savio did not complete his degree at Oxford, and they moved back to California in February 1966.[2] In 1968, he ran for state senator from Alameda County on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, but lost to Nicholas C. Petris, a liberal Democrat.[2]

In 1999, the media revealed that Savio had been tailed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the moment that he had climbed onto the police car in which Jack Weinberg was detained. He was followed for more than a decade "because he had emerged as the nation's most prominent student leader".[2] There was no evidence that he was a threat or that he had any connection with the Communist Party, but the FBI decided he merited their attention because they thought he could inspire students to rebel.[2]

Even after he had left the FSM, the FBI called him to their Berkeley office. They told Savio that they had received letters of a threatening nature towards him, but they would not speak with Savio's attorney present. However, Savio would not agree, and instead criticized the FBI "for failure to make arrests and take action in the South where human rights are being violated every day."[2] At this point the meeting ended.

According to hundreds of pages of FBI files, the bureau:

Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled information about his marriage and divorce.

Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists to interview him and his wife.

Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him when he and his family travelled in Europe.

Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and "neutralized" under the bureau's illegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.[11]

The investigation finally ended at the beginning of 1975 and at that point an investigation into the FBI's abuse of power began. Savio's ex-wife, Suzanne Goldberg, said that the "FBI's investigation of her and Savio [was] a waste of money and an invasion of privacy."[2]

Savio had a history of heart problems and was admitted to Columbia-Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol, California, on November 2, 1996. He slipped into a coma on November 5 and died the following day,[10] shortly after being removed from life support.[4]

On October 16, 2012, the Sebastopol City Council rededicated the Downtown Plaza as the "Mario Savio Free Speech Plaza".[17] On November 15, 2012 the "Mario Savio Speakers' Corner" was dedicated on the campus of Sonoma State University. At the ceremony, Lynne Hollander Savio told the audience, "I hope you will use this free speech corner often, to advocate and organize with dignity and responsibility for the causes you believe in."[18]